Religion: “It’s a Gospel, ain’t it, same as the others? All right then, if you believe in the other Gospels, why not in that? And in the Gospel according to Joseph it says clear’s day …”
Pensions: “All right, who put him in the Senate? Ham-&-Eggs, that’s who put him there. And what does he do to us? He betrays us, sells us out. Now this Ahasver is really for us. He knows we’ve got a right to live and by God we’re agoing to fight for it.”
Sensation: “He’s a menace to society, he is. Going around killing people like that is witchcraft, and what does it say in the Good Book? Go on, what does it say? Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’!”
Matt looked down at a newspaper lying on a bench. The headline read:
NEAR RIOT AVERTED
ANGRY MOB STORMS TEMPLE OF LIGHT
This was the macrocosm of the Harrigan case, this hurly-burly of crisscrossed excitement. But it was the microcosm that perturbed Matt. He could not forget Joseph’s ruminations so easily as the lawyer had commanded. He could not forget that Gregory Randall was indecently avid to bring about a marriage which the living Wolfe Harrigan had obstructed; nor could he forget that R. Joseph had stepped surprisingly out of character in order to inform him, unofficial confidant of the investigating Lieutenant, of that suspicious fact.
The streetcar was so crowded that Matt, wedged in between a corpulent businessman and a dear old lady with seventy-nine bundles, was unable to verify his suspicions of the beard; but when he got off, he waited at the corner until he saw the now familiar flamboyant figure retracing its way from the car’s next stop. He loitered until he was sure that the beaver had a chance to rediscover him, and then set out for the Marshalls’ home.
The Lieutenant answered the bell himself. He was wearing a frilly rubber apron and holding a red-headed two-year-old in his arms. He looked foolish, knew it, and didn’t think much of the idea.
“I was helping Leona,” he said (in a tone which seemed to add, “Want to make something of it?”) “Come on in.”
Matt glanced over his shoulder, saw that the beard was safely ensconced behind a tree across the street, and entered the house.
“Nice place.”
“We like it. This, as you might guess, is Terry.”
“Hello, Terry.” Matt sounded grave and a little uneasy.
“Say hello like a big boy. What shall we call the man, huh? Mr. Duncan? Uncle Matt?”
“Scatch,” said Terry, pointing with great interest at Matt’s scar.
Matt laughed. “Scatch’ll do.”
“Which reminds me.” Marshall set Terry down on the sofa.
“Maybe a little scatch and soda before dinner?”
“Swell—only make mine straight.”
“Mine, too. I just put in the soda to point the gag. My mistake.”
Marshall wen off to the kitchen, and Matt found himself alone and helpless before the big eyes of Terry. Tentatively he made a face, but Terry was not interested. Then he noticed the Donald Duck in a corner, fetched it out, and began to pull it along the rug, trying his best to produce appropriate quacks.
“No,” said Terry decisively. “He quacks. Don’t you quack.”
Abashed, Matt stopped his noises and heard that the duck was indeed quacking very nicely on its own. Terry watched it for a bit, then climbed down from the sofa, reached underneath, found a large rubber ball with Pinocchio on it, and handed it to Matt. “So,” he said.
Matt looked at the ball. “So?”
“So.” Terry was emphatic.
“So …” said Matt reflectively. “Well, well.”
Terry reached up his small fist, tapped the ball in Matt’s hand, and stamped his foot. “SO!”
Matt’s eye lit up with relief as Marshall returned with a tray, a bottle, and three small glasses. “I’m afraid I need an interpreter.”
Terry, too, appealed to his father. “Da,” he pleaded, “make Scatch so.”
“You learn these things,” said Marshall philosophically as he poured the drinks. “‘So’ means ‘throw’—as in ball.”
Matt got it. He backed off a little and threw the Pinocchio ball softly to Terry, who crowed with pleasure.
Marshall handed Matt his glass. “Thanks. But why the third? Don’t tell me you’re weaning the infant on this?”
“Terry was weaned,” said Marshall, with the father’s pitying contempt for the bachelor, “fourteen months ago. Don’t you think my wife wants any refreshment?”
Matt raised his glass. “Well, to Terry and your wife! That’ll do for a starter.”
“So!” said Terry, and threw (or soo) the ball back with a perfection of aim that knocked the glass from Matt’s hand and spread a nice puddle of whisky on the rug.
“Terry!” came a voice from the kitchen door. Leona Marshall, her hair even redder than her son’s, hurried into the room and with what seemed like one motion scooped Terry up in her arms, shook a reprimanding finger at him, tossed the ball onto the couch, replaced the glass on the tray, produced a cloth from nowhere, mopped up the puddle, wiped her hand, and extended it to Matt. “Good evening, Mr. Duncan. Nice to meet you.”
“Kind of you to invite me.”
“No kindness of mine. I’m just an obedient slave. Though it was,” she smiled, “kind of Terence to tell me this morning. He usually gives me about an hour’s notice at best.” She looked down at her son. “Time for bed now, Terry. Say good night.”
“Scatch so some more,” Terry protested.
Leona frowned. “Scatch?”
“That’s me,” said Matt. “The scar.”
“Oh. No, darling, Scatch’ll throw some more some other time. You go to sleep now. He’s so good about going to bed,” she explained to Matt, and added hastily, “I hope.”
And good he was, apparently to Leona’s own amazement. “Dinner’s as soon as I get back,” she announced as she bore Terry off. “Ask Mr. Duncan if he wants to wash.”
“Do you want to wash?” the Lieutenant asked dutifully. “Or do you think a refill might pass the time better?”
For answer Matt held out his glass.
“Duncan, you have sound ideas. But let me warn you to wash at some point in the evening. Leona’s never happy unless somebody uses her guest towels.”
In a surprisingly short time Leona was back. “You must be a good influence, Mr. Duncan,” she said, untying her apron. “He was an angel. You should see him now, all tucked in with his panda. Would you like to peek in?” she suggested eagerly.
“I’m afraid,” Matt hastily replied, “I might disturb him.”
Marshall grinned. “You’ll get used to it sometime.” He held out the third glass. “Leona?”
“Look,” said Matt. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”
“Duncan,” the Lieutenant laughed, “that line creaks anywhere, and right in front of a woman’s husband it’s rank.”
“No. I mean it. I—” He set down his glass and stared incredulously at Mrs. Marshall. “Good God, you’re Leona!”
Leona nodded calmly and took another sip. “Uh-huh. You see, darling, my Dread Past catches up with me. Yes, Mr. Duncan, I’m Leona. The Flame Girl.”
Matt burst out in hearty howls. “This is marvelous. When I think of the time I’ve sat up in the gallery of the Follies Burlesque and watched Leona do the Flame Dance! The Red-Headed Passion Flower—wasn’t that what they called you?”
“That,” said Marshall drily, “was one of the printable epithets.”
“I even used to get ideas. I’d think if maybe sometime I could ever meet Leona—” He caught Marshall’s eye and stopped the sentence there. “And now at last I do meet Leona and find the Compleat Housewife.”
Leona finished her drink. “Isn’t it shocking? That was way back when Terence was on the vice squad. They raided the show and dragged all of us off to jail, only I got a life sentence. A good life, too, in its way.” She touched Marshall’s hand lightly with hers—a casual-seeming gesture, but Matt felt the endurin
g love and warmth which it expressed.
“No hankering for the old life?”
“Heavens, no! Besides, I’m afraid Terry fixed that. He didn’t really help my chief professional asset. But now come on to dinner. The roast’ll dry out if we get going on my past.”
“And Leona’s roasts,” said Marshall proudly, “are something to savor.” He started to lead the way to the dining room.
“Terence!” said the one-time pride of the Follies. “Are you going in to dinner looking like that?”
“No, dear.” The Lieutenant of Detectives sheepishly removed his rubber apron.
“I never,” Matt confessed a half hour later, “tasted a leg of lamb quite like that. What does it? The touch of your fair hands?”
“It’s a Persian seasoning, of all things. You wouldn’t believe the name if I told you. You mix it to a paste with olive oil and coat the roast with it. Like it?”
“Like it?” Matt exclaimed reverently. “If I ever get married” (he gave two sharp raps on the wood of the table) “you can give my bride a package for her wedding present.”
“More?”
“By all means.”
Leona beamed with that contentment peculiar to a cook who is serving a second helping to a well-pleased guest. “I like to try things,” she said. “I get ideas and I try them on myself when Terence is working, and then if they’re any good he gets them.”
“And they’re always good,” Marshall maintained.
“Not always. You should taste some of my lunches.”
The street lights went on just then. Through the diningroom window Matt could see his bearded shadow still at his post. “Look, Marshall,” he interrupted. “Am I being tailed?”
Lieutenant Marshall leaned back and expansively undid a vest button. “Yes,” he admitted. “Does that surprise you?”
“No. No, I suppose not. But must it be done so badly?”
“You mean you spotted the man? That is bad. There’s a passage I remember in one of the Holmes stories—”
“I thought you didn’t like mysteries,” said Leona.
“Hell, darling, Sherlock Holmes isn’t just mysteries, any more than Macbeth is just a play or Bist du bei mir is just a tune. The Holmes chronicles are something wonderful and superhuman and apart. I grew up on them, and I worship at the shrine.”
“I’ll agree they aren’t mysteries,” said Leona, with a noticeable absence of her husband’s enthusiasm. “Anybody that’ll hold out clews on you like that—”
“This passage, now …” Matt suggested.
“Yes. I think it’s in The Lion’s Mane. The explorer says, ‘I saw no one,’ and Holmes replies, ‘That is what you may expect to see when I follow you.’ Well, that’s the ideal of all shadowing. We aren’t all Holmeses in the police force, but nobody should let a man notice he’s being followed. What made you realize it?”
“I couldn’t help it. He’s got a big bushy red beard and dark glasses.”
Marshall laughed. “The police force pleads not guilty. Some of us may be bad; but dear God, not that bad.”
“But he is shadowing me,” Matt insisted.
The Lieutenant looked more sober. “That’s interesting. Now who else would want you tailed? One thing—if he’s as obvious as all that, your own tail will spot him and somebody else will be set to tail him. Pretty picture, isn’t it?”
“I love it,” said Leona. “It’s a nice game. Couldn’t I play, too? And I’m sure Terry’d be just wild about it. You know,” she confided to Matt, “the more I learn about the Serious Aspects of Police Work, the more it reminds me of Terry. Finished?”
Matt nodded regretfully. “If I had any more room …”
Leona had risen and was clearing the table. “You’d better have some room, because for dessert there’s blueberry pie. Do you like blueberries?”
“There’s room,” said Matt.
Chapter 14
“As Leona said,” Marshall began, “I don’t like mystery stories.”
The two men were seated in front of the fireplace, with the bottle and glasses between them on a table from a nest. From the kitchen they could hear the clatter of Leona washing up the dinner dishes. Matt had offered to help, but his hostess had persuaded him that she was quite unused to masculine assistance. “Terence always says, ‘The more you keep your man out of the kitchen, the sooner he’ll get you out of it.’ It hasn’t worked yet,” she added, “but I’m still hoping.” Matt had remembered the rubber apron, and decided that Marshall’s masculine independence was somewhat less strong when there wasn’t company.
“But this book,” the Lieutenant went on, “has something. Apparently this damned locked-room business is old stuff to mystery novelists, even though it’s new in my police experience. And this novelist has an entire chapter in which he analyzes every possible solution of the situation. Now what I want to do is read these solutions to you, and we’ll try and see which of them can possibly fit our case. I never thought I’d see the day when I tried to solve a case with a mystery novel; but damn it all, this is a mystery-novel case. Ordinary routine just doesn’t apply.”
“Who wrote this book?”
“A guy named John Dickson Carr, and he damned near makes me change my mind about mystery novels. I’ll confess” (he sounded almost belligerent about it) “that I read the whole damned novel last night, sleepy as I was; and it’s first-rate writing. If mystery novels are as good as this nowadays, maybe I’d better give them another try. But that’s beside the point. We aren’t interested in the literary excellence of Mr. Carr’s Three Coffins*; we want to know how a murderer gets out of a locked room.” He began to fill a corncob.
“Now Carr’s detective, Dr. Gideon Fell—a splendidly ponderous old man who sounds like G. K. Chesterton with a drop of walrus blood—starts out by specifying that you must have a validly locked room, ‘hermetically sealed’, as he calls it. Early novelists, it seems, used to shirk the problem with secret passages, which Dr. Fell finds disgusting. I’m not so worried about the esthetic aspect, but we know from expert testimony that there are no secret passages in that room nor any other holes or apertures large enough to admit a weapon or a hand. That is fact, and we’re with the Doctor so far. Now for his theories of classification:
“‘First!’ he says. ‘There is the crime committed in a hermetically sealed room which really is hermetically sealed, and from which no murderer escaped because no murderer was actually in the room.’”
“But,” Matt protested, “Joseph and I saw the murderer.”
“A guy named Stuart Mills ‘saw the murderer’ in this book, too, and still the explanation fitted under this head. Let’s go on to the more detailed listings:
1. It is not murder, but a series of coincidences ending in an accident which looks like murder.
What’s wrong with that for our case?”
“Everything. Accident is completely out of the question. If Wolfe Harrigan had shot himself accidentally, his fingerprints would be on the gun. Unless … Could the automatic have been dropped and gone off in no one’s hands?”
“Dropped after Harrigan had obligingly wiped the handle clean and then stooped over so that he received powder burns? No go. Then Point Number One, Accident, is out. Next:
2. It is murder, but the victim is impelled to kill himself or crash into an accidental death.
This, it appears, involves either the power of suggestion or a poisonous gas that drives the man mad. Any comments?”
“Same as before. If the situation doesn’t fit suicide, it can’t fit murder by suggestion. Wolfe Harrigan didn’t pull that trigger.”
“I agree. Point Number Two, Suggestion, out. Next:
3. It is murder, by a mechanical device already planted in the room, and hidden undetectably in some innocent-looking piece of furniture.
I don’t like that ‘undetectably.’ It doesn’t sound what you’d call flattering to the police search. But imagine something ‘undetectably hidden,’ and go on from th
ere.”
“I don’t know as I can. That’s saying, ‘Imagine the impossible is possible and still prove why it couldn’t happen.’”
“All right. I’ll take this one myself. If a contraption did exist for firing that automatic, it must have been attached to the weapon in some way. If so, then somebody must have detached it before the police broke in; and if you’re going to put a man in that room anyway for detaching, he might as well be the murderer. That’s no help. Point Number Three, Mechanical Device, out.
4. It is suicide, which is intended to look like murder.
All the variations on this involve getting rid of the weapon, so that the police find, say, a stabbed corpse with no knife at hand—conclusion: murder. But our problem is the exact opposite. We have a corpse and a weapon, but we can prove that the corpse did not use the weapon. Point Number Four, Suicide, out.
“The next one is tricky:
5. It is a murder which derives its problem from illusion and impersonation.”
“I don’t follow that.”
“I’m not sure I quite get the example he gives here myself. It involves the murderer pretending to be the victim, so that the victim seems to have entered the room the instant before it is locked whereas he’s actually been lying inside murdered for some time. Of course that couldn’t apply in our case, but…”
“I think I know what’s tempting you. That word ‘illusion.’ You’re back at the projected scenery. I tell you there’s no possibility of a magic lantern show. Try for yourself projecting a picture on glass with a fire back of it.”
The Lieutenant puffed slowly. “I know. But this figure you saw … Did it do anything? Did it even move?”
“We looked at it only a second and then started inside. I don’t think it moved in that time, but I couldn’t swear to it.”
“Then if it wasn’t a person …?”
“If it wasn’t a person, it was a statue as big as a man. How did that get out of the room? Is that any easier?”
Nine Times Nine Page 15
